Roy McMakin is a creator who eludes categories

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, October 24, 2008

Seattle artist Roy McMakin poses with details of two works: "6 Photographs of a Painting of a Boy I Bought at an Antique Mall," left, and an untitled piece.

Seattle artist Roy McMakin poses with details of two works: "6 Photographs of a Painting of a Boy I Bought at an Antique Mall," left, and an untitled piece.

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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McMakin's chest of drawers, with one drawer that doesn't fit, (untitled), 2008.

McMakin's chest of drawers, with one drawer that doesn't fit, (untitled), 2008.

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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"2 Photographs of Both Sides of a Fragment of a Blouse That Wasn't Completed," 2008.

"2 Photographs of Both Sides of a Fragment of a Blouse That Wasn't Completed," 2008.

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Roy McMakin is a creator who eludes categories

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Seattle's Roy McMakin draws heads that are full of houses. All his life, he has been obsessed with floor plans. The cozy structures he made as a child worried his father.

"The word 'sissy' came up," said McMakin. "While growing up, I had a complicated time with gender roles."

Over tea on a rainy afternoon, he talked about his life, which began on the move. Born in Wyoming to a father in the oil business, McMakin had lived in 14 places, including Billings, Casper and Anchorage, before he was 9, when his family finally settled in Denver.

In a monograph to be published by New York gallery Matthew Marks, art-book publisher Lisa Eisner, who is McMakin's friend, described what she knew about his youth: "While everyone else was making their Barbie dolls have sex with GI Joe, Roy was buying furniture at garage sales and reworking it -- painting it, sawing the legs off, making old useless furniture fit into the vision of the world inside his head. But don't get me wrong -- Roy was not some stereotypical gay decorator in training. He was a furniture visionary who used his mind to create something so subtly subversive that it might take you a few seconds to catch on to its visual language."

At 52, McMakin continues to elude categories, helped, as all artists with fluid identities are, by Andy Warhol's fusion of commerce and art.

McMakin developed the initial identity for J. Crew stores, built the office furniture for the Getty Museum and created the set for "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno." He also moves easily in the world of galleries, public art and museums.

He builds houses but is not an architect. He makes furniture for use and sculptural contemplation. Like a musician who plays slightly off the beat, everything he does contains at least an element of the unexpected.

Working with Mark Woods, who has long documented McMakin's furniture, he produces photographs of objects rendered so exactly that it's hard to tell where the object leaves off and the image of it begins. Woods shoots each object in hundreds of small sections, making each section the focus of the frame before digitally collaging these singular pieces together.

The result is a homage to the act of seeing it dissected into a collage of sharply articulated visual moments with no fadeaways. He leans toward the domestic and accepts mistakes, each one carefully considered for its layers of meaning.

His exhibit at the James Harris Gallery in Pioneer Square is the first since his 20s in which figures appear.

Happy with melancholy

Those who assume a direct link between an artist's work and personal life are frequently mistaken. McMakin's theme is Proustian loss and longing, but he appears to be a happy man. He's married to research scientist Mike Jacobs, surrounded by friends and avid in his aesthetic endeavors.

In a small catalog for the exhibit, McMakin opened with a discussion of color.

"I favor green. I prefer to wear blue. I like red, but with a little orange. I'm crazy for a certain yellow. But I don't particularly like purple."

"Purplish" is the show's title. Across one wall are "6 Photographs of a Painting of a Boy I Bought at an Antique Mall." The awkwardly rendered child with a book on his lap has glanced up to stare into the middle distance. The six shots reveal the painting from every angle, front, back, top, bottom and sideways.

Facing the child is a photographed painting of a dashing young man, possibly the father. Beside the photo of the painting is a photo of the backside of the painting through which the image has bled, like a ghost of an unattainable connection. Mother is a photographed pattern for an unfinished blouse. There are large photos of old silk curtains, the kind lonely children hide behind.

In the center of the room is a small chest of drawers, polished wood and painted white. One drawer that doesn't fit rests on top. A high chair he found at a garage sale is a dark and stained wood. It stands on a white pedestal, its legs painted white halfway up.

In Venice Beach along the boardwalk, palm trees are painted white halfway up to discourage rats from climbing them. The high chair is a fortress, which children cannot enter or leave on their own. Because the child evoked is on his own, the chair is empty.

The art of design

When McMakin moved to Seattle in 1993 from Los Angeles, his reputation as a designer exceeded his reputation as an artist. Artists were among those who bought his furniture, although few thought of him in the same category as themselves.

John Baldessari was an exception. He wandered into McMakin's store one day, looking for a comfortable chair. Today, most of the furniture in his house is by McMakin.

For the upcoming monograph, Baldessari wrote that he shares large chunks of McMakin's vision: "A love of minimalism (while slightly poking fun at it), a Mattisean love of color, a goal of keeping others off balance, and a love of removal/absence, a quest for the paradox of simplicity and complexity. But overall, a mission to sharpen perception, it's a significant accomplishment to get one to really see and understand a chair (and not feel self-conscious in sitting on it). I don't think Roy has designed an ironing board yet, but I'm sure it would double as a painting."

McMakin says he moved to Seattle because he was tired of a scene dominated by the entertainment industry and in search of a less aggressive approach to careerism.

"I wanted to live in a moist place," he said.

He knew nobody. After launching his almost-never-open furniture store in his studio in Madrona, he waited to see what would happen.

Most of what did derived from Los Angeles.

In 2003, Michael Darling, then associate curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, organized a solo McMakin exhibit titled, "A Door Meant as Adornment." He called McMakin a "master craftsman with the heart of a conceptualist." (McMakin gets credit for the fact that Darling is now modern/contemporary curator for the Seattle Art Museum, as he talked Darling into applying for the job.)

True friendship

Key to McMakin's acceptance in Seattle was support from art patrons Bill and Ruth True. In 2004, he designed their contemporary art space known as Western Bridge. (He has since designed their house.)

There is nothing quite like Western Bridge. Inside, despite architectural flourishes that animate the space, the building does not take center stage from the artists exhibiting in it.

The outside is more dramatic. Its stacked-white-box look is blunt and industrial, but it opens into a pair of windows that are domestic in origin. Attached to the south end is a gray storage tanker of a building topped with a 2-foot panel of painted sky. The painting is McMakin's idea of a trade: Because the building blocks the sky, McMakin replaced it with a replica.

McMakin's tables, chairs, sofas and daybeds are unadorned nouns, facts with a twist of dry wit. An exquisitely crafted wooden chest he might paint pink with one white drawer. A sofa of mismatched green pillows has stubby white legs. A tabletop doesn't quite fit its base.

In 1965, conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth created "One and Three Chairs" (a photo of a chair, a chair and a dictionary description of a chair). A point of view that is austerely tough-minded in Kosuth is sweet, almost goofy in McMakin.

Ten years ago, he opened a workshop in Georgetown to fabricate his commissions, both furniture and sculpture, and currently employs 10 assistants. He is the only Northwest artist with an installation in the Olympic Sculpture Park. It's a cluster with chairs, a bench and a table, a red neon ampersand and a tree, all spelling out the words "Love and Loss."

This fall he's having a show in London at Established & Sons Gallery, co-founded in 2005 by Alasdhair Willis, who is married to fashion designer Stella McCartney.